Category: Events

Friday and Saturday, 16-17 March 2018. Registrations Now Open: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/devotion-objects-and-emotion-1300-1700/ Program: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/259673/devotions-lowres.pdf Contact for further enquiries: Julie Davies, daviesja@unimelb.edu.au , or 8344 5981 Religion is a cultural field in which emotions exercise a preeminent role. Feelings are integral to religion, and their significance is encapsulated in the concept of religious devotion. This symposium will focus on the relationships between religious devotion, objects and emotion in Europe between 1300 and 1700. Religious devotion promotes the exercise of a wide range of emotional expressions and behaviours that assume, communicate and give shape to the broader religious belief systems and cosmologies of which they are part. Objects used in religious practices accrue the power to arouse, channel and mediate our emotions; while their materiality and use in devotional practice can expand our understanding of the historical layering and expression of religious emotions, and…

Free Public Lecture | Keir Lectures on Art: Chardin’s Girls: The Ethics of Painting will be held Thursday, 8 March 2018. Professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. What did it mean to be a girl in the 18th century? Professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth examines 18th-century French painter Jean- Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s intriguing depictions of young adults as images of emergent subjectivity. Lajer-Burcharth’s lecture considers the complex ethics of these representations of a nascent gendered self. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. A specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth century French art, she has also written extensively on contemporary art, including, among others, the artists such as Janine Antoni, Gary Hill, Mona Hatoum,…

Artbank will launch its new Collingwood premises by opening its doors to all on Saturday 24 March, offering the opportunity to go behind-the-scenes and view one of the largest collections of contemporary Australian art in the world. Eventbrite invite here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/artbank-open-house-tickets-42660945035 The Artbank Open House is designed to promote the accessibility of the Artbank collection and to provide the opportunity to see some great examples of contemporary Australian art. Part of a renewed presence in Melbourne, the Open House is one of a number of new initiatives which include: A new non-residential Studio Program, which offers creatives practicing in the visual arts (including artists, curators, writers, designers and academics) the opportunity to realize projects and progress their work in an architecturally purpose-designed space with its own laneway access, all within the increasingly unaffordable city fringe. Residents will be selected via…

‘Collecting the Now’ Symposium 7th – 8th March, 2018 NGV-I Clemenger Auditorium The art and design of the twenty-first century is characterised by complexity and change. Contemporary artists and designers experiment with new materials, emerging technologies and fluid conceptual frameworks that challenge normative approaches to the collection, preservation and presentation of art within collecting institutions. ‘Collecting the Now’ means collecting works that defy easy categorisation by media type or size and may invite an active and iterative engagement with the visitor that contradict traditional preservation conventions. The program for this two-day symposium will bring together an inter-disciplinary mix of conservators, installers, registrars, contract specialists, curators and artists to explore the challenges presented by the acquisition and display of contemporary art and design. It will be an opportunity to share the innovative methods, practices and materials being used to address their…

A Baroque Bishop in Colonial Australia: The cultural patronage of Bishop James Goold (1812-1886). This international symposium (15 to 16 February 2018, with keynote opening evening on 14 February) examines the patronage of Melbourne’s first Catholic Bishop, James Goold and his contribution to the cultural life of colonial Melbourne, especially through his art collection, library and patronage of architecture. The conference will be opened with a keynote public lecture Image and Imagination, The Pictorial Presence of Heavenly Grace in Baroque Painting by Professor Dr Klaus Krüger, Professor of Art History, Freie Universität Berlin Keynote Lecture: 14th February 5:30-7:30pm at the University of Melbourne, Elisabeth Murdoc Theatre. Registrations here Symposium 15-16th February, 9am onwards at The Cardinal Knox Centre, St Patricks Cathedral; & Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A, University of Melbourne, Parkville. Registrations here Download the Symposium Program here. About the Symposium…

CANDICE BREITZ IN CONVERSATION | SUN 17 DEC, 6.30PM–7.30PM $20 M / $25 A / $22.50 C https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/candice-breitz-in-conversation/ International artist Candice Breitz, discusses her multiscreen video installation Love Story, 2016, a work that focusses on the current, worldwide refugee crisis, in conversation with director and producer Ivan O’Mahoney. Doors open at 6pm with drinks available for purchase. Candice Breitz is internationally recognised as a leading contemporary photographic and video artist. Her latest video installation Love story, 2016, considers the global scale of the refugee crisis. The work reflects on how celebrities are often treated by the media as more newsworthy than people facing real-world adversity. The film is based on interviews conducted with six people who have fled their countries as a result of a range of oppressive conditions: Sarah Mardini, who escaped war-torn Syria; José Maria João, a former…

A research seminar delivered by MacGeorge Visiting Speaker, Associate Professor Anthony Gardner, “The Artist as Unsettler: Tom Nicholson and the Art of Historiography.” Date: Wednesday 13 December 2017, 6pm. Venue: Room 553, 5th Floor, Arts West North Wing, Arts West Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville. Anthony Gardner is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History and Theory and Head of the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. He writes extensively on postcolonialism, postsocialism, and exhibition and curatorial histories, and he is one of the editors of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015), NSK From Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst – An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia (with Eda Čufer and Zdenka Badovinac, MIT Press, 2015), and (with Charles Green) Biennials, Triennials, and documenta (Boston, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).…

Joan Kerr: the making of a feminist art historian Ursula Hoff Lecture 2017 Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn, art historian, University of New South Wales Date: 6:30pm, 11th December 2017 Venue: Forum Theatre, Arts West Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic, 3010 When Professor Joan Kerr was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the year before her death in 2004, her friends were determined that her intellectual legacy should continue. The reason for this was not just friendship, nor a determination that a great feminist scholar should survive the strange machismo of Australian art historiography. Rather it was a recognition that Kerr’s inclusive approach was especially rewarding as a way of mapping Australian art and its objects. By challenging the traditional hierarchies of media and association that privileged both oil painting and networks of mateship, Kerr revealed a rich tapestry that not…

Venue: Australian Tapestry Workshop, 262-266 Park St, South Melbourne Date: 5pm, Saturday 16th December 2017. Free. Bookings required. www.austapestry.com.au Phone: 9699 7885 Pae White is an internationally renowned multi-media artist who creates large-scale installations in a variety of media; from large-scale machine-loomed tapestries to ceramics to tinfoil. Her practice merges art, design, craft and architecture to create works that transcend traditional boundaries. The Hancock Fellow, established by the Tapestry Foundation in 1998 in honour of former Chairman Arnold Hancock OBE, allows opportunities to bring internationally recognised artists in tapestry, textile and design to visit the ATW and share their expertise. Previous Hancock Fellow have included Reiko Sudo, NUNO Corporation, Beverly Gordon and Dr Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye. As the 2017 Hancock Fellow, White will provide insight into her long career with a focus on some recent projects that use textiles as…

Margaret Wertheim will give a talk as part of the Public Pedagogies Conference at Victoria University Footscray on Thursday 23rd November. See the eventbrite page for bookings and more information Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted writer, artist and curator whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. The author of six books including “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,” a history of space from Dante to the Internet, and “Physics on the Fringe,” she has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Aeon and many others. With her twin sister Christine she founded the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based practice devoted to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. (theiff.org.) Through the IFF, she has created exhibitions for the Hayward Gallery (London), Science Gallery (Dublin), MASS MoCA (MA), and Art Center…

Melbourne Masterclass: “Paris is the World”- The history of Old Regime and revolutionary Paris (17th and 18th centuries) | 9-12 January 2018 | The University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria ‘Paris is the world’ wrote Marivaux in 1734. “The rest of the earth is merely its suburbs.” His soaring elegy to the French capital captured the city’s central place in the imagination of the Enlightenment. This masterclass will examine how Paris became synonymous with gleaming architectural wonders, harmonious facades, and numerous public squares, in the context of France’s social, political, and cultural upheavals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with Henri IV’s and Louis le Grand’s search for urban grandeur, Paris was transformed by and for its elites into a new Rome. At the same time, a Paris of the people, particularly in the overcrowded ghettos of the…

A symposium on the ever-changing states of photography from the invention of the medium to the digital present. From the magic lantern to Instagram and ‘connected photography’ this symposium unpacks a little history of the transmission of images. The Transit Lounge of Photography examines where the medium of record has been and asks: how is it travelling. The Transit Lounge of Photography is all about making connections with photographic images and reading their vapor trails, presenting a series of projections on images and ideas in the share-house of photography. Join us for an afternoon looking through photographs and at photography ending in a live magic lantern show in the evening. Coordinated by Patrick Pound (Deakin Motion Lab Centre for Creative Arts Research) and the CCP. Presented by Deakin Motion Lab Centre for Creative Arts Research Saturday 21 October, 3pm–7:30pm Bookings required,…

Ever since new criticism, literary study has been developing ideas of close reading. Since the inception of poststructuralism there has been wide acknowledgment of the constructed nature of the text. In the last 15 years there have been even more models for understanding texts, including ‘distance reading’ and ‘surface reading’. Given that amazing richness of interpretive possibilities, it is strange that the humanities continue to teach writing on a rudimentary level, stressing clarity, concision, and organisation – basic pedagogy that was already out of date 100 years ago. This talk is an informal survey of the absence of the tools of literary theory and rhetoric in fields such as sociology, anthropology and art history, with special reference to examples such as Rosalind Krauss, Alex Nemerov, T.J. Clark, Stephen Greenblatt, Steven Pinker and Saul Kripke. James Elkins’ lecture is coordinated in…

The Power Institute with Sydney Ideas is pleased to present a lecture by James Elkins, Professor Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins is the third speaker in our Keir Lectures on Art series. ABSTRACT | This lecture is not concerned with global art per se, but with the global writing of art history. Current initiatives supporting the international practice of art history, such as the Clark Art Institute’s Mellon Foundation-funded projects, are aimed at the exchange of information and the facilitation of travel and study. Such programs, Elkins argues, can promote a homogenised approach. In this lecture, Elkins challenges the assumption that there are traditions of art-historical scholarship different from those that are widely acknowledged, suggesting instead that scholarly practices exist, but not as art history…